Although we’re in the Caribbean at the moment, enjoying the sea and scrumptious food, I feel I have to write about our experience at a B&B we found randomly on the German autobahn a little while ago during our road trip through Europe.

Aichelberg definitely did not strike us as a place where we would find great food not to mention gourmet style cooking. However, on our way back to France from Vienna, we had to make a stop for the evening and decided to check out a place called Lausers Adler in the little town of Aichelberg. The main reason for stopping there was that it was really close to the highway and away from the bigger cities where finding accommodation and more importantly, parking would have been a pain.

However, we were in for a pleasant surprise when we sat down for dinner soon after checking in. The decor of the place which looked like it hadn’t been changed since the 70s is not entirely inspiring, however, one look at the menu told us that we were in for a treat as far as the food was concerned.

The place is run by a husband-wife team and the husband is the chef who runs the kitchen and seems to have an ability to dream up interesting plates of food. For instance, we were served a frothy, light tomato soup that was served in a coffee cup and was called a tomato ‘cappucino’ to whet our appetites.

I spotted kangaroo fillet on the menu and since I’d never tried kangaroo meat before (let alone see an actual kangaroo), I had to go for it.

The food came out prettily plated up. The meat was surrounded by all manners of vegetables that added colour and everything tasted just perfect. As for kangaroo, we decided that it tasted a bit gamey, something between beef and venison. According to Peter, it resembled horse meat in taste.

For dessert, we tried some vanilla icecream with caramelised pineapples. But it wasn’t just plain icecream with some fruit. It was flavoured with balsamic caramel (have to try that combination out sometime!) and pink peppercorns. Who would have thought of putting peppercorns in a dessert! The chef later explained, in halting English and mostly German, that these peppercorns were milder in taste which is why he used them in a sweet dish.

On our way back to the room, I noticed his graduation certificate from cookery school hanging on the wall that showed the year as 1987. We’d also read in the brief introduction on the menu that he’d worked in a variety of international locations before setting up this business. There was a cookery school just beside the B&B that was run by the same chef and seems to be proof of his experience and interest in food.

All in all, it was a pleasant and completely unexpected experience. The kind that makes any trip truly memorable.